


[Fandom stats] Translated works on AO3

by toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [64]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2019-09-15 10:06:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16931256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: Are most translated works translated from English?  Are most translated by the author?





	[Fandom stats] Translated works on AO3

**Author's Note:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/115588637144/i-see-a-lot-of-popular-english-fic-translated-into).

Anonymous asked:

> I see a lot of popular english fic translated into other languages. Are there popular fics from other languages that get translated into english? Or is that only the other way around.

Hey!  Thanks for the great question. :)

To get a sense of the answer, I looked at the **[1096 works using the “Translation” tag](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Translation/works)** on AO3.  This has some limitations — not all translations use this tag, and not all the works that use this tag are translated fanworks (the Supernatural fandom seems to be fond of a “Castiel is a translator” trope, e.g., and some fans are translating original song lyrics into English, all of which gets lumped into this tag — but which I don’t want to count here).  Still, let’s start with this tag and look at how many of the works [**list English as their language**](http://archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Btitle%5D=&work_search%5Bcreator%5D=&work_search%5Brevised_at%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=0&work_search%5Bsingle_chapter%5D=0&work_search%5Bword_count%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=1&work_search%5Bfandom_names%5D=&work_search%5Brating_ids%5D=&work_search%5Bcharacter_names%5D=&work_search%5Brelationship_names%5D=&work_search%5Bfreeform_names%5D=Translation&work_search%5Bhits%5D=&work_search%5Bkudos_count%5D=&work_search%5Bcomments_count%5D=&work_search%5Bbookmarks_count%5D=&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=&work_search%5Bsort_direction%5D=&commit=Search) (and assume that those are translated to English):

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMxPBGFu65qFK2jkGzEkVcQnXENe2JGon0uF5Mo?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

From this, we can see that about **22% of the works in the Translation tag appear to be translations into English from another language.**

Now, the above chart isn’t necessarily accurate; even out of the works that are actually translations, some of them are wrongly labeled English.   To try to get a sense of the error rate, I sampled 40 of the works and classified them by hand (though I threw out 3 works that were in the same series as others in the sample):

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipPCNr7VNMOBJKVJZc4BaSRMPvw8yYlY8l6ZqnNo?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

So, out of the 37 works I looked at, 8 (21%) were not actually translations, and 4 (11%) were actually translations from English into other languages.  But **25 (68% of the sample, or 86% of the just the works that were translated) were actual translations to English**. **So let’s assume that the first pie chart isn’t exaggerating the number of English translations terribly.** If this small sample were actually representative of the “Translation” tag as a whole, then about 237 of the works in the tag would not actually be translations — and of the remaining 859 works, 163 fanworks would be actual translations into English. 

I was also curious how many authors translated their own works into English.  Within my small sample, it was **about half self-translations** :

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMDpkVWFQpHtXBe6Fg365r864R7dfjRWur4iVwX?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Within this small sample of 25 English translation fanworks, there were no huge surprises in terms of the common origin languages. **Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and German were the most common in the sample** , and most of those are fairly **[common languages on AO3](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/113323520144/toastystats-what-languages-are-ao3-and-ffn)**.  Korean has the smallest presence on AO3, and I noticed that the original fanworks that those were translated from came mostly from outside websites — but so did several of the works originally posted in Italian and other languages.

Within the sample, the most popular fandoms were Harry Potter and MCU — again, nothing too surprising. :)

I did notice some of the same author names popping up several times when I browsed through the “Translation” English language works, and i was curious how many unique authors there are translating things into English.  This is complicated by the fact that there is no consistent way of indicating the translator; many translators list themselves in the “author” field (often along with the original author), but some only mention themselves in the notes.  Nonetheless, I went through all the English works tagged “Translation” and looked at how many works listed the same author. **Assuming that those “authors” were actually translators, there are a bunch of quite prolific translators** out there doing multiple translations:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipNBZ1ZIRBKPEHNTSpeJc7jdEs9_6o9pQ-7dS0qb?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

(Author/translator names omitted for privacy.)

Many of these prolific translators are translating their own works (so they are both author and translator).   **The person with the most translations has translated 22 works into English.**  Nice!  :)

Nonny, I hope that helps answer your question — yes, there are indeed some translations to English, though it looks like most probably go the other direction.

BTW, if you’re curious how I got the small sample — I sorted the relevant fanworks alphabetically by title and then randomly selected a couple pages of results.  This is not actually random sampling, but I didn’t expect the bias to be too terrible.  Raw data for all of the above stats, and more info about the samples, is **[here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gm26fJqkreEm2sbT3o_fhsGrWdt6quCWPD7e7SUu92o/edit?usp=sharing)**. 

(P.S. paging [tea-and-liminality](http://tmblr.co/mHf_CyqYp0_AdxYoqBPI6cA) and [allthingslinguistic](http://tmblr.co/m44EEXltEWdeyh62nYEo6Fw), who might be interested.)

**Author's Note:**

> Comments welcome, but I’m in the middle of a massive fandom stats backup due to Tumblr purge, so I may be slow to respond.


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